1. Field of the Invention
This invention is directed to nursery equipment, in general, and to a pruning apparatus, in particular.
2. Prior Art
There are many types of pruning machines and/or apparatus available known in the known art. However, most of the pruning and cutting of plants is done by hand. As a result, the nursery business is highly labor intensive. This situation leads to many difficulties and/or problems. For example, a relatively large crew of workers is required in order to maintain the nursery stock in proper condition. The expense of individual labor is an ever increasing cost of doing business. It is, therefore, highly desirable to render the situation less labor intensive and more capital equipment intensive. Moreover, it is becoming more and more difficult to find personnel who are of the unskilled or semi-skilled classification who will perform many of the tasks which are required in handling nursery stock.
As a bit of background, it is explained that much nursery stock must be handled and tended frequently while at the nursery. For example, in the case of so-called 1-gallon or 5-gallon plants of the evergreen type, it is highly desirable to effect various pruning operations. One of the pruning operations is a vertical prune along the sides of a plant to prevent the plant from becoming too bushy and spreading out in a horizontal fashion. The reasons for this are several. First of all, the larger the plant, the more surface area which it requires. This translates into fewer plants per acre wherein costs of maintaining a nursery are increased. In addition, if the plants tend to spread too widely, some of the lower growth is then shaded by the upper growth and tends to wither and die. This has the dual effect of causing the plant to be less saleable from an esthetic point of view, and furthermore, causing the plant to tend to grow tall and scraggly.
In the past, each of these plants had to be handled individually. That is, the plants were separated from the other plants in the storage field (in containers of 1-gallon or 5-gallon size) and then trimmed by the field hand using a hand pruning machine. The field hand or cutter was required to turn the plant during the pruning or to physically move about the plant himself. The plants then had to be restacked in as close proximity to each other as possible in order to preserve ground as suggested above. Also, the pruning was somewhat erratic because of the hand labor involved.
In the past, using this technique, a crew of twelve workers, operating at high efficiency, could cut and trim approximately 10,000 plants of the 1-gallon size in 8 hours. Consequently, in a large scale wholesale nursery, a crew of this size could be permanently assigned to merely performing the "vertical prune" function, as described.